The Girls of Piazza D'Amore

by Connie Guzzo-Mcparland

  Lucia, Tina, and Aurora had grown up together, and Lucia and Aurora had been desk friends throughout school. School desks were built for two, and friends were usually allowed to share the same desk; they called one other cumpagne e bancu. Desk friends developed a very close relationship. They shared the same inkwell, borrowed one another’s pencils and erasers, learned to read each other’s handwriting, and found ways to cheat and copy from one another. If during the course of the year the friendship ended, however, having to sit so close became torture.

  The three older girls’ education had stopped after the fifth grade. They would have had to travel to the provincial city of Catanzaro to continue, but none of their parents could afford the expense. A girl’s only possible occupation was to work for free for the local dressmaker in exchange for learning the trade. Giovanna, the seamstress, took me in as an apprentice that summer in spite of my young age, because she and my mother were good friends. I was very mature for my age, everyone told me. I was given the task of basting seams before the pieces of cloth were sewn together into skirts, dresses, and blouses. Neither Tina nor Lucia was particularly adept at sewing. They spent time chatting and laughing at the shop, but their sewing skills never progressed beyond basting seams like me. Aurora applied herself more, making and cutting patterns, and doing finer needlework. I often saw her sitting on Donna Rachele’s balcony, mending clothes.

  Aurora was as well-groomed as any of the other village girls. Her fair skin and hair and large, light-grey eyes set her apart, but her fragile beauty was somehow tarnished by the fact that her mother was a peasant, a Ciociara, originally from somewhere near Cassino. The gossip in the village was that Paola slept with the padrone, and that the reason he was so kind to Aurora was that he felt a fatherly love toward her.

  Aurora had a very friendly disposition and went in and out of people’s houses with more ease than was usually considered acceptable, but this was easily explained by the fact that her mother was an outsider. Aurora spent a lot of time with the Abiusi’s, even eating her meals there whenever she played with Lucia. Comare Rosaria called Aurora a zingarella or the little gypsy.

  In the summer evenings, the three girls would go out with their water jugs for a passeggiata to the Funtanella. I followed them. I was a useful little helper, since I distributed all their love notes back and forth. Each of the three girls had a boyfriend courting her. By the time they were fifteen or sixteen, it had become common knowledge that Lucia “made love” with Don Cesare’s nephew, Totu; Tina with Michele, a young tailor who looked like the actor Rossano Brazzi; and Aurora with Saverio, a blacksmith who was a close friend of Michele.

  Fare l’amore was what the ritual of courtship was called. Many marriages, though arranged by families, in reality entailed personal selections. In the restrictive society of the village, where women and men knew to keep their distance, sexual interest started young. Most teenaged girls strolling to the Funtanella were conscious of the long glances young men gave them. If interest was kindled, a young man would station himself under the girl’s window, and, if she were keen, she would peek out. A few words might be exchanged, but lovers mostly communicated with their eyes. Whenever a young man slouched against a wall and looked up at a balcony, people would say that the couple faceva l’amore, was making love. Some couples “made love” this way for years, every day for hours, before they were ready for the official engagement. If the families were agreeable to the relationship, they would pretend not to notice the young man gawking at their window. When the girl spent too much time on her balcony, her parents might threaten to shower the man with dirty dishwater, or worse. When the family objected, the wooing would be kept discreet.

  In the three corners of Piazza Don Carlo, there were three girls making love, often at the same time, with the three young men stationed beneath Lucia’s, Tina’s and Don Cesare’s balconies, while I sat on my balcony, like a little guard watching their every gesture.

  One afternoon, on his habitual walk, Professore Nucci stopped by our square and stood for a few minutes staring, taking in the scene of the three couples making love. Maybe emboldened by each other’s presence and the absence of adults in their households on that particular day, the girls leaned over the balcony rails and went beyond the permissible silent eye contact, giggling and responding to the words of love whispered by the men below, who gestured with outstretched arms as if wanting to touch them. Aurora’s mother had left a basket of freshly-picked figs on the fountain wall for all to taste. The men gorged themselves on the first ripe figs of the season, savoring the juicy red pulp while looking up at the girls with yearning eyes.

  “Che bellezza! Piazza Don Carlo é una vera piazza d’amore,” exclaimed the Professore, startling the three couples from the spell of unrestrained passion they dared to display out in the open for all to see. He declared Piazza Don Carlo a piazza of love.

  “Bravo, maestro,” Totu shot back clapping. Everyone laughed and applauded while the Professore bowed, picked a fig from the basket, and walked down the hill.

  After the girls recounted the incident at the seamstress’s shop, Giovanna took to calling them “l’amuruse,” the girls in love, and whenever she chided them for talking too much, or not paying attention to their work, she’d say, “Where do you think you are, at the Piazza d’Amore?”

  When the three girls walked to the Funtanella for water and passed by their boyfriends, on the bridge, before descending the steps to the fountain, one of the boys would hand me a candy with a little note around it, which I passed on to the girl it was addressed to.

  I knew to keep the letters secret, especially from Lucia’s brother, who was known to have a bad temper and to dislike Totu. One evening, when he caught the two whispering together in the alley next to the house, Alfonso dragged Lucia by her long hair and kicked her inside, yelling as he shut the door, “Stay inside and don’t let me find you going around like a zingara again.” This didn’t keep Lucia from going to the Funtanella the next evening and giving me a note to pass on to Totu.

  Alfonso always seemed angry at someone. I never saw him smiling. Totu was an innocent bystander. He and Alfonso had never had any fights, but Alfonso had an ongoing feud with Don Cesare, his second cousin, and the reason he disliked Totu was that Totu was Don Cesare’s favourite nephew.

  “I don’t understand why your brother is so against him,” Giovanna told Lucia after the hair-pulling incident. “Totu is the best catch for any girl. He’s good-looking, smart, and has a future ahead of him. Does your brother think you’re going to find better than that?”

  “I don’t care what my brother thinks,” Lucia answered, not very concerned. “He’s just jealous. I love Totu, and he loves me. That’s all that counts.”

  I lived for those evening passeggiate and never wanted to miss one, often arguing with my mother over what to wear. After a light dinner of tomato salad with a piece of provolone cheese or mortadella, she washed my face, combed my hair away from my face, and tied the top with a large pink bow before letting me run out to join the trio.

  Thinking back to those summers, I realize how easily we girls let life take its course and shrugged off as normal the contradictions present in small parochial villages: love and hatred, friendship and rivalry, generosity of spirit and petty jealousy. My world then just was. It was going to la Funtanella with Lucia and other older girls every evening to fetch water in the two-handled clay jugs that we carried, not on our heads like the older women, but balanced on a hip, which forced us to walk with a slanted and languid gait. At times, the spring water gushed in tiny torrents out of the mouths of the stone gargoyles; at other times it just trickled down. And sometimes, in the arid spells of summer, the mouths were dry, gaping holes, making the gargoyles look like the catechism book pictures of the desperate, damned souls destined to be thirsty forever. But the flow of the Funtanella was never questioned then. For many years after settling in Montreal, I’d replay those
past moments in my mind, like a bedtime story that children read over and over, each time finding new pleasures or new questions to ask. Though these memories have become less frequent over time, they come accompanied by small pangs of discomfort, a tightening of the chest. I remember reading that, for some, having had a happy childhood is almost as painful as having suffered an unhappy one. It feels like a persistent ache of yearning, like the grief for a lost love.

  The summer slid past us, and then Father left. He left the village so often that the actual parting didn’t leave a vivid memory. We all knew the absence would be short; he would call for the family as soon as he could.

  My father was portly and solidly built. He had a large forehead with a receding hairline, prominent red cheeks, and a dimple on his chin. He looked like a jolly ice-cream vendor who would give second scoops for free. He was one of the few men in Mulirena who had no enemies; he was known as a friend who could never refuse anyone a favour. Everyone liked him, especially the children. When he returned from Milan, he always came back with small toys for all. When the children of the ruga passed him at the bar, he bought them candies or ice cream.

  The summer of 1955 was the longest period that Father spent with the family, and I discovered things about him that I had never noticed before. He liked reading as much as I did, and, for someone with only a fifth-grade education, he could discuss politics and music as well as the other more educated men of the village. He liked to peruse a thick book on ornamental architecture, with pictures of different styles of stone columns, cornices, and friezes, that he had studied from in Milan. He said he wanted to be well prepared for working in the new country.

  After his return from the war, Father had tried his luck working in Monte Cassino with his father. There was lots of construction going in at that bombed city, but earnings were meager and often not paid on time – or not at all. Like many other stonemasons from the village, he eventually found regular work in Milan. His seventeen-year-old brother, Vincenzo, was anxious to earn his own money, and Father brought him there as his assistant.

  On a routine climb up a scaffold, Vincenzo fell and, right under Father’s eyes, died instantly from a blow to the head. This happened when I was a baby, but later I heard stories of Father’s return to the village late at night to give his mother the news. He had promised his mother he’d take care of her youngest child in Milan. Unable to face her, he had his best friend prepare the family before Father showed up to ask for his mother’s forgiveness. He had to bury his brother in Milan since the cost of transporting the body was prohibitive. The death left a wound in the heart of my father’s family that would never heal. I always remembered my Nanna Caterina dressed in black, with a sad, drawn-out look on her face.

  Father was the only remaining son of his family, but he had four sisters. Two, married with children, still lived in the village, one had joined her husband in Argentina, and the eldest had settled in Montreal. It was this sister, my aunt Rosina, who sponsored Father and made it possible for him to emigrate.

  My Nanna and all of my aunts had broad faces with strong jaw lines, wide hips, and solid legs. I was often told I had taken after that side of the family because of my large face and high forehead, but my mother worried because I was too skinny for her liking.

  She used to make me drink Ferrochina, an iron-based drink, beaten into a raw egg every morning.

  My mother’s side of the family was better off than my father’s. They owned land, a grocery store run by her brother Pietro, and a bakery adjacent to the store. My mother worked at the bakery a few days a week, helping her widowed mother bake round firm breads almost as big as a bicycle wheel. I loved going to the bakery for lunch when my mother had a slice of warm freshly baked bread ready for me with a chunk of provolone cheese from the store.

  In the evenings, Father took it upon himself to give reading lessons to an illiterate young peasant who lived in an alley near our house. By the end of the summer, the eighteen-year-old could write his name and read from my second-grade reader.

  My mother’s two cousins, who worked in Rome as tailors, were also in the village for the summer, and in the evenings we would all gather at their place. The men played briscola, and the women played scopa with the children. After the card games, Father took to reading from a book about the true-life story of the bandit Giuliano, who hid in the mountains with a woman until he was betrayed by one of his men and gunned down by a lawman. Father assigned roles from the story to himself and my cousins. He played Giuliano, whom everyone admired for his daring and generosity toward the poor peasants who helped him dodge the law.

  During the day, Father spent most of his free time walking with his friends and discussing politics, though he was not as passionate about the topic as some of the others. He was in a very delicate position. My mother’s family had always been Christian Democrats, while his father opposed the party.

  The only time I remember my parents arguing was when Mother found out that Father had lent money to his best friend. Father insisted that friendship was more valuable than money. Mother agreed about the friendship, but this friend was not trustworthy. He never worked, was rumoured to cheat on his wife, and had taken advantage of Father’s generosity before.

  “What upsets me is that you believe everything your friends tell you,” she argued.

  “And you worry about a few lire when I’ll soon be working in America,” he replied. “America” was any country on the far side of the ocean.

  “I don’t like counting my money until I have it in my hands.”

  Father kicked a chair against a wall. “You women are always right,” he said, and he went out to meet his friends at the bar. Unlike my short strong-boned aunts, my mother was tall and thin, with a delicate face, but her frail appearance was deceptive. When she put her foot down to me and my brother, and sometimes even to my father, no pleading could change her mind.

  Before that outbreak, I had never known my father to get easily upset, but a few days later, he was livid when a clerk at the post office told him he was too busy to serve him. Father lodged a written complaint against the clerk. Then later he started a petition to have my third-grade teacher removed from Mulirena for incompetence. I had told him repeatedly that we used to spend the day in her class chasing flies. Both times, Mother told him that he was wasting his time, but Father said he did it out of principle, that people in Milan would never put up with the inefficiency of public workers as they did in Calabria.

  “Why can’t we make any progress here, like in the North?” he said.

  “Your father doesn’t really want to leave,” Mother told us after one of his outbursts. “He’d be happier if we all moved to Milan.”

  When Father left in September, Mother kept telling everyone that, for her, the main advantage of Father going to Canada was that the family would be able to live together in one place.

  Before leaving, without telling my mother, he bought my brother a bicycle.

  To me he made a promise. One day, in the piazza, he sat me in Don Cesare’s car and said, “When you turn twenty-one in America, I’ll get you a car. You’ll learn how to drive like one of the americane in the movies. You can be whatever you want to be there…

  a teacher… a lawyer… a doctor.”

  “I want to be a teacher,” I said.

  When I was not in school or at the seamstress’s shop, I spent my free time in church. Every time I went to confession, Don Raffaele would urge me, “Pray that you become a saint.” Maybe Don Raffaele said this to everyone he confessed, but he singled me out enough times to make me feel he was grooming me for sainthood. Even before I could read, I belonged to the Catholic Action Movement. One could belong to this group from childhood to adulthood; each age group was identified by a different name, from the Piccolissime to Donne. Boys and girls met separately once a week with a group leader who read stories about saintly people who dedicated their lives to the se
rvice of others. Every month we received a magazine from Rome that taught us about the Catholic missions in Africa, South America, and many other parts of the world. There were rules and regulations, and each year we were given different parole d’ordine, words to live by. The one I remember best was saper sorridere sempre – know how to smile always. The selfless saintly life was what we were taught to aim for, so each night I prayed, “God, help me become a saint.”

  I didn’t imagine myself as just any old saint, one who simply prayed, went around blessing people, and performing miracles, but rather the type who earned her halo through acts of charity and heroism. We children used to exchange holy pictures of saints who were our heroes. Saint Maria Goretti was one of my favourites. She was a young girl who let herself be beaten to death rather than succumb to a rapist. Naturally, she was the patron saint of chastity. One picture of her was worth two or three ordinary ones. It was the same for Saint John Bosco, who was everyone’s favourite. The patron saint of children, he helped wayward kids find their way. In pictures, he is depicted with children staring at him adoringly, like a teen idol.

  While I was still in kindergarten, and still a Piccolissima, Don Raffaele chose me to recite a poem in church on the occasion of the Pope’s birthday. Mother read it out loud until I learned it perfectly. At the altar, standing on a chair in front of the microphone, I saw the sea of faces looking up at me, and I panicked. My mind went blank. The priest came up next to me, and whispered the first line, “Noi siam le piccolissime del nostro buon Gesù.” I recited the rest. Afterwards I ran to my mother and hid my face in her lap, ashamed that I had forgotten my lines. But that didn’t deter Don Raffaele from putting me on stage again.

  On a Sunday early fall afternoon, just before the start of school, the priest came to speak to us at one of our meetings. He gave us the happy news that a big celebration was planned for the Feast of the Rosary. The village’s masons had built a new house for the priest and a grotto with a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes outside the church. Under his house, adjacent to the church, would be a theatre, so he could show films all year long. As part of the celebration, a play of the story of Saint Bernadette would be put on to inaugurate both the grotto and the theatre. We spoke with excitement of the plans. He announced that I would be Saint Bernadette. Rosalba, our leader, would play the part of Bernadette’s mother.